Elemental Security compliance system wins a seal of approval

In last week’s “Best Products” issue of Network World, I chose Elemental Security’s Elemental Compliance system as a “Category Breaker.” That is, in the words of editor Beth Schultz, “…products [that] raise the bar with novel ways to solve today’s enterprise challenges.” Picking Elemental was easy since I used the dreaded phrase “new paradigm” when I first told you about the system last May.

We try to keep the choices of Category Breakers secret until the magazine is published so I avoided talking to the folks at Elemental Security while I prepared the write-up of their product. Which meant that, when I did finally agree to talk to them on the day the “Best Products” issue made the newsstands, what they wanted to talk about was a new release of the product (Version 2.0), now called Elemental Security Platform (ESP), which hit the shelves this week. If Version 1.1 was a Category Breaker, then Version 2 could be called the Category Definer.

Version 2 doesn’t introduce any ground-breaking new features it simply expands on those already in the product – better scalability, broader platform coverage, finer grained role definitions, flexible scheduling, better integration with 3rd-party products and much more. Nothing spectacular, just bigger, better, stronger, faster! The high points:

* Scale: Supports up to 10,000 agents.

* New platforms: Solaris (server), AIX, HP-UX, Mac OSX (Agent).

* Managing Policies:

– Fine grained admin roles (read/write permissions).

– LDAP & RADIUS Elemental user authorization.

– Flexible policy scheduling (start / stop time, days of week).

– Rule exceptions.

* Policy Content:

– Best practices: CIS Benchmarks.

– Regulatory: HIPAA, PCI.

– Data protection (disable local storage and printers).

– Anti-Virus (Trend Micro), Anti-Spyware (CA, McAfee, Webroot, Lavasoft).

– Increased rules count (2,000-plus), additional enforcement (300-plus rules).

* Reporting:

– Increase to 100-plus.

– Fine grained scheduling, configurable over time reporting periods.

– Scheduled e-mail delivery.

– New report types (inventory / remediation / trending and change).

* Cisco NAC – Phase I integration complete.

Check what we said about Elemental’s Version 1.1 last May, then head over to Elemental’s Web site to read more about Version 2. Policy-based computing is something you should have been practicing all along on your Windows network. Elemental makes it easy to extend that paradigm to all the platforms you manage.

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Editor’s note:

Microsoft’s new Vista client operating system will be out before you know it, so you need to start thinking about a migration plan now. Check out our new “Countdown to Vista” research center, featuring up-to-the minute reviews of the latest beta versions of Microsoft Vista, written by Network World Lab Alliance tester Tom Henderson.